Researching Law Volume 31 Issue 1 - Flipbook - Page 12
R ESEA RC HI N G L AW
THE ABF TODAY: Q & A
Editor’s note: We asked four ABF Research Professors for their take on the ABF Survey and the impact it
has had on the ABF and the broader legal profession. Below is their input, with answers edited for clarity.
Q: What does the ABF
Survey mean for the legal
field today?
Traci Burch:
(The ABF Survey) changed the
way we study criminal justice
bureaucracy and how they serve
communities and their clients. It
gives us a different set of criteria for
which to evaluate agencies.
John Heinz:
As professor Samuel Walker said (in
his work), the ABF research during
the 1960s established the field of
TRACI BURCH
Associate Professor
of Political Science,
Northwestern University
12
criminal justice studies. It showed
how to do that research, that one
needed to get out into the field and
collect data and that it wasn’t all
the “law of the books.”
John Hagan:
I think the ABF Survey had its most
significant effect in putting this
emphasis on how cases come in
and how they pass through the
system. It gave us the first classic
findings of the great attrition in
cases, and of the discretion that
was involved in those kinds of
decisions. It’s hard to imagine a
time in the field of criminology
where we didn’t know about that.
From that point on to the present,
people have paid a lot of attention
to the processing of cases through
the system and the disparities
between racial class groups in
terms of what happens, which
cases continue, and which don’t.
Elizabeth Mertz:
Prior to the ABF Survey findings, the
idea was that if each case doesn’t
get prosecuted, that’s a failure on
the part of the prosecutors. Another
assumption was that if prosecutors
(The ABF Survey) changed the way we study
criminal justice bureaucracy and how they
serve communities and their clients. It gives
us a different set of criteria for which to
evaluate agencies.